Vivid, layered, and provocative period drama about the trade-offs of backing tradition versus letting go.
Twice longlisted for the Orange Prize for stories set in distant eras, Clark (The Great Stink, 2005; Savage Lands, 2010, etc.) takes on the dicey task of revitalizing Edwardian aristocrats grappling with the heir loss and social change ushered in by World War I.
The ancestral wick of Sir Aubry Melville and his wife— Eleanor to her extramarital companions—coils to ash with the death of their only son, Theo, killed in France before his Christmas letter arrives. Missing her golden boy, Eleanor consorts with spiritualists. “I’m not sure hush is what Eleanor’s after,” her mouthy youngest child, Jessica, snipes to a condolence caller. “She prefers the dead jabbering 19 to the dozen.” Ignored (as always) by their mother, and with presentation at court and weekend gaiety no longer an option—“Every man you might have married is already dead”—Theo’s teenage sisters, Phyllis and Jessica (call them Sense and Sensibility), plot their pacts with the new normal: the elder girl ducks her duty to reproduce by volunteering at a convalescent hospital, then pursues a degree in archaeology, leaving the younger trapped with their table-rocking mother and a father preoccupied by the future of Ellinghurst, the crumbling pile which by tradition must pass to males with the Melville surname. In doubt of ever being allowed to start her own life, 19-year-old Jessica bolts and cadges a job in London as the agony aunt columnist for a new women’s magazine. Clark reminds us that one of the pleasures of reading historical fiction is meeting characters whose thoughts are their own but also mirror the wrongdoings and legacies of their time. We commiserate with Jessica for having to jolly older men, only because they vastly outnumber the age-appropriate ones. She does her best to torment her mother’s godson, Oskar Grunewald, the most insightful of their childhood set. A math prodigy and hopeless stick-in-the-mud (by Jessica’s estimate, though not her sister’s), Oskar faces his own wartime challenge—his German heritage could scrub his chance of working with his scientific idol at Cambridge. Ironically, his loyalty to the Melvilles poses a greater threat to his career.
Vivid, layered, and provocative period drama about the trade-offs of backing tradition versus letting go.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-12999-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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